Lammy pitch on Sudan raises questions about UK ties to Israel and UAE

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy has a message pinned to the top of his X (formerly Twitter) profile: “We must not forget Sudan.”

The message is accompanied by a video of Lammy, wearing a white shirt with one button undone and light beige chinos, walking in Adre, a Chadian desert town on the border that is currently hosting over 230,000 Sudanese refugees. “Just behind the border in Sudan, people are suffering one of the biggest humanitarian disasters on Earth,” Lammy says in the video. He recounts the story of a woman who was burned, beaten and raped.

Turning to the camera, the British Foreign Secretary asks: “Where is the liberal outrage?” He continues: “We cannot have a hierarchy of conflicts and put this one at the bottom.” The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been ongoing since April 2023, displacing over 11 million people and causing an unknown number of deaths, potentially as many as 200,000.

Western efforts at diplomacy to end the war have been either unsuccessful or negligible. Cameron Hudson, a former US State Department official, told Middle East Eye that Britain, as a former colonial power, is “completely absent on Sudan.” Lammy’s visit to Chad was the first by a British Foreign Secretary. The visit included a meeting with Chadian leader Mahamat Deby in the capital N’Djamena, and the announcement of an additional £20 million in funding for Sudan, after the UK doubled its aid to £226.5 million in November.

However, Lammy’s efforts to focus attention on Sudan have also brought him up against uncomfortable questions about the involvement of the UK’s key ally, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and British attempts to deflect accusations about its military and diplomatic support for Israel. In the UK, left-wing MP Zarah Sultana challenged the Foreign Secretary in parliament. Sultana had been suspended from Lammy’s Labour Party in July for voting against maintaining the government’s cap on child benefits.

Sultana detailed the “weapons and support” provided by the UAE to the RSF, pointing out that the UAE is “one of the UK’s biggest arms buyers, receiving billions of pounds worth of defence export licences in recent years,” and asked if the UK government would commit to halting arms sales to the UAE until it could verify they were no longer supplying the RSF. Lammy first referred to Sultana as “Sir,” then laughed that he was still jetlagged, before continuing that the UK regularly engages with regional partners, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and that peace in Sudan needed “the support of everyone in the region and beyond.”

This failure to directly address the UAE’s role in Sudan is not new, either for the UK or the US. Middle East Eye has extensively reported on the network the UAE has used to support the RSF, which human rights groups and now the US government say is committing genocide. Before Joe Biden left office, Brett McGurk at the White House said the UAE had promised to no longer supply the RSF, an implicit admission that they had been doing so, but the supplies have continued.

Last September, when Lammy made his first official visit to the UAE, the UK briefing mentioned “cooperation in clean energy and AI, and close coordination on regional security and humanitarian issues,” but made no mention of Sudan. The UAE’s sovereign wealth fund is now the largest in the world. Money from the UAE is flooding into London, and a UK government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Middle East Eye that seeking investment from the fund is “very explicit government policy.” Last November, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Saudi Arabia and the UAE seeking new investment from both countries. “I don’t think the UK is alone in its position on the UAE,” the official said.

“The geostrategic realities still play a role and Western politicians are still too timid or unprepared or unwilling, or lack the imagination and courage to deal with this in a useful way, while still maintaining some of the important relationships,” Kholood Khair, a Sudan analyst and director of the think-tank Confluence Advisory, told Middle East Eye. “The lives of the Sudanese people should not be sacrificed on the altar of geostrategic relations between Washington and Abu Dhabi, or London and Abu Dhabi.”

Lammy’s question about “liberal outrage” over Sudan echoes comments from US Senator Marco Rubio, who stated that the RSF’s killings in Sudan were “actual genocide” in an era where the word “genocide” is “overused.” Both have been interpreted as part of a rhetorical strategy that originated with right-wing Israeli influencers: pointing to the lack of concern over Sudan as a way of suggesting that concerns about Israel’s war in Gaza are suspect. “I do think it is a deflection from Gaza,” Khair said, noting that this was also evident in Rubio’s and Elise Stefanik’s confirmation hearings, President Donald Trump’s nominee for US Ambassador to the UN. Stefanik believes Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank.

Khair also said she has witnessed what she called “humanitarian gaslighting” by Western nations at the UN, where meetings about Sudan are set up as “a very convenient way to talk about Sudan, to the detriment of Gaza, but without any commitment.” Lammy is a supporter of the “Labour Friends of Israel” group, has taken “multiple” donations from pro-Israel lobby groups, and has said that the bombing of refugee camps “may be legally justified” during the war in Gaza. David Mencer, now a spokesperson for the Israeli government, was Lammy’s campaign director when he was running to be the Labour candidate for Mayor of London.

Hudson, a former CIA and State Department Sudan analyst, told Middle East Eye he saw Lammy’s approach as “performative,” and that the British Foreign Secretary was “talking about a human rights agenda without any substance.” “What we’re seeing is a lot of form without substance,” Khair said. “The Hollywood walk in the Chadian desert might help raise Lammy’s profile, but I’m not sure how much it helps raise Sudan’s profile, because that requires more substantive engagement with what’s going on, and that certainly includes calling out the UAE and others.”

“As an American, I find it interesting that the British are emulating the US policy six months to a year after it’s been proven to be ineffective. So, Lammy, like Biden, is engaging in moralizing, taking this very high-minded approach, but it’s not getting us any closer to a solution.” Last November, Lammy led a resolution at the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire, which was vetoed by Russia. “The Russian veto is a disgrace… Putin is shameful,” the Foreign Secretary said in the chamber. According to Sudanese officials aligned with the army, the Russians – who previously supported the RSF through the Wagner Group, but now more fully support the army – were simply acting on Sudan’s wishes, as the officials aligned with the army were not informed in advance by Lammy that he would be proposing the resolution.

This lack of communication with officials aligned with the army is reflected in Lammy’s choice to visit Chad, rather than Sudan, as the Chadian government has facilitated the supply of weapons from the UAE to the RSF. Officials from a number of European countries are now visiting Sudan, and the army controls most of the country outside of Darfur, the vast western region that is the RSF’s power base. Both the US and the UK have taken a “both sides” approach to the war in Sudan, viewing the RSF and the army as equally culpable, and equally bad. Analysts like Hudson argue that the RSF is worse, and that the army and its officials – some of whom worked for the dictator Omar al-Bashir and are associated with the Islamist movement that supported him – need to be properly engaged with by Western powers.

The UK’s increased funding is welcome, particularly as the Trump administration looks set to cut humanitarian aid, but the UK – unlike the US or Norway – has not engaged with the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), the Sudanese mutual aid groups that have just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and which are organizing most of the aid on the ground. Following Lammy’s visit to Chad, the UK said it hopes to convene a meeting in London of Sudan’s neighbors “and other international partners, to facilitate peace.” “That’s a great step,” Khair said. “We just need to see it implemented in a useful way. That means the UK has to bring more international power and impetus than it has done… and I’m not sure we have a Foreign Office and a Foreign Secretary that are willing or able to do that.”